hackbash

There’s a set of responsibilities incumbent on a journalist that needn’t trouble a copywriter, PR executive or marketing assistant. The latter are generally assumed to have an agenda, with a message to sell or place, and their words regarded accordingly. The former should be writing for the reader.
Given the above, it’s not always surprising that [...]

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Everybody’s going green. Green is the new black and the next best thing and the big new idea and the dog’s bananas. Green is great.
In 2007 as in no previous year, brand managers appear to have really grasped the green nettle. For some it’s about specific product opportunity to be ‘leveraged’, for others it’s just [...]

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Christmas. Always a busy time of year for journalists. If you’re on a monthly you get to go mental until the office closes for the Christmas week, and if you’re on almost anything else you’ll be brushing mince pie crumbs from your cardigan and heading into the office on 27th December. If you’re short-staffed you’ll [...]

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[NB - I broke the images in this post. Sorry.]
I’ve been banging on about hyperlinks a bit lately, but they’re a pretty important part of writing online. Done well, embedding links within your copy can provide context, give a route to further reading, or even act as punctuation or emphasis. Taken together, the benefits improve [...]

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At first glance, this headline would appear to be fairly major news. The sort of thing that one might expect to see mentioned in any casual sampling of reliable internet news sources. Something, I’d even go so far as to say, that could knock Diana off the front page of the Express.
As it turns out, [...]

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Must be a slow week in online journalism, as I feel myself moved to observe the passing of Facebook’s compulsory “is” in the status field.
Thrilled and baffled in equal measure, I and others emerged blinking this morning into a limitless grammatical utopia – names have been disguised to protect the idle.
It’s an odd thing that [...]

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I’m not happy.
I worked for too many years in IT, and if there’s one lesson that you’d think I would have learned from my time there it’s that faster is not always better.
This would, on early evidence, seem to apply to my internet connection, which was upgraded about a week ago from a faultless 8Mbit [...]

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One of the things that troubled both Charlie and me before we came to work at Spannerworks was the very idea of a journalist working for a marketing company. That and the idea that we’d never again be able to listen to Bill Hicks and laugh without reservation.
Neither of us was sure exactly how, indeed [...]

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Charlie and I normally agree on a remarkably high proportion of things, so much so, in fact, that people are beginning to see us as a happily married couple. Just to scotch that particular rumour, then, here’s something we don’t agree on.
Or should that be, “here’s something that we don’t agree on”?
In the context of [...]

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We weren’t quite sure how to take mrsnakeface’s comment on my terms and conditions post (precious content?), but it made me ask myself a couple of questions:
1) Is this an angry website?
That’s not the intention. Perhaps Charlie and I just have a lot of pent-up rage? “Hackbash” was coined with a gathering of journalists in [...]

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